Elvis 75: Good Rockin' Tonight

Legacy / RCA;
2009

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In 1992, Bono recorded a solo version of "Can't Help Falling in Love" for the Honeymoon in Vegas soundtrack. His take on the song is slow and somber, with almost no instrumentation save a bit of percussion. Filling out the sonic space is a recording of an Elvis Presley press conference, which finds him answering a few random questions, including one about what he's been reading. Elvis begins his replies with "Yes sir" or "No sir," like the polite Southern boy he was, and he sounds distant, careful not to say anything that might offend. I suspect that Bono included this spoken bit because it represented for him a theme he had explored a few years earlier on U2's "Elvis Presley and America", a murky, hazy track found on The Unforgettable Fire that some see as filler but which I've always found fascinating. "Elvis Presley and America" and Bono's version of "Can't Help Falling in Love" both speak to one of Elvis' fundamental contradictions: How can singer say so much-- through someone else's song, even-- and then find feelings and ideas so hard to articulate away from music?

Elvis now occupies a strange place in music in part because he was never a songwriter. Long ago, of course, very few singers were also writers, but the 1960s changed much of that. After Bob Dylan and the Beatles, there was an expectation that the words that came from the singer's mouth also originated in his brain. There have been many exceptions, some of them significant (disco comes to mind), but a strong sense of agency has continued to be important. Present-day pop singers who aren't writers (and most of the major ones have writer credits) still take pains to position their albums as personal statements. A rite of passage for a pop singer is the album that says, "This is me-- this is what I'm all about." Celine Dion is an outlier in this regard, but the list of singers of her ilk is not long. We've been conditioned to want some sort of direct line to the artist's point of view. With so much of Elvis' music, the sense that it reflected something about how he felt about the world wasn't there in quite the same way. This doesn't diminish his accomplishments, which are massive and undeniable, but it does mean that as new generations discover him, they'll be hearing him differently.

Over the years, Elvis' estate and RCA have taken a few different tacks to position him as a vital musical force and win him new fans. In the early 1990s, the hardcore devotees and serious music obsessives hit the jackpot, as RCA and BMG released three well-received box sets totaling 15 CDs, which together offered a searching overview of his entire career, dividing his output by decade. The sheer scope of that reissue project, and its ultimate success (two of the sets went platinum, the other gold), affirmed that Elvis was an artist worth exploring in minute detail, with musical treasures that extended well beyond his dozens of top 10 hits. But the last of these boxes came out almost 15 years ago. Since then, as the ranks of those who had their minds blown after seeing him on "Ed Sullivan" continues to thin, Elvis' place in music seems a little less assured. ELV1S, a collection of his #1 hits released in 2002, sold well, but it still had nowhere near the impact of the Beatles' 1, upon which it was obviously modeled. It's tempting, in a year in which the Beatles catalog was remastered and Michael Jackson's music hit the charts after his untimely death, to stack Elvis up against these giants and see how he fares. Is he reaching new generations of fans? Are download-happy kids looking for ways to flesh out their Elvis mp3 collections?

Good Rockin' Tonight, a 4xCD box set commemorating the 75th anniversary of Elvis' birth and covering his entire career-- from his first acetate in 1953 to the 2002 remix of "A Little Less Conversation"-- could be seen as an attempt to answer the question of what he means today in a relatively succinct package (there are 100 songs here, but he recorded more than 700). There's little for the fans that own those decade sets-- the 50's Masters box was complete, and the 60s and 70s collections hit just about every highlight-- but Good Rockin' Tonight offers a thorough and well-rounded look at a seminal artist for those who might know only a handful of hits. There are a few songs from his gospel records, which are usually cordoned off from his pop work on Elvis comps, as well as selections from his many film soundtracks (these were omitted from the 60s box) and some live cuts. The lot is sequenced in chronological order according to when it was cut, and you come away from this set with a good sense of how his music developed and changed over the 24 years of his recording life.

Ironically, because Elvis was not a songwriter and was so guarded about what he shared with the public, his music ends up having an odd sort of purity. All we have is surfaces-- the grain of his vocal, his phrasing, video and film images showing us how he moved (indeed, the easiest way into Elvis for newbies may well be YouTubes of performance footage from 1956 or the 68 comeback special, where his charisma, confidence, and physical beauty are as astonishing as ever). So in one sense, the story of this box set is the story of that virtuosic and unmistakable voice, how it grew and adapted and bent songs to fit Elvis' vision of what they should be.

"Jailhouse Rock" has one of rock history's greatest snare sounds, but it's Elvis' half-screamed phrasing that makes it sound like a world-changing anthem. The assurance and richness of Elvis' tone on "Love Me Tender" is striking, but remembering when reading the set's well-done documentation that he was only 21 when he recorded it amplifies its depth. There's the drive and warmth of his tone on "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame", one of his more enduring second-tier hits, as Elvis seems to stick his neck out in the verses and then come back to a more assured place for the chorus. On "Suspicious Minds", he establishes a tone of anxiety and yearning and masterfully sustains it through the song's entire length without becoming tiring. And on into the 70s, when his hits were more likely to land only on the country charts, there's the big-hearted generosity of his version of the now-standard "Always on My Mind", showing how easily he could do simplicity when it was needed. For a singer whose vocal tics are so widely known that they became nuggets of pop culture history, the emotional range and variety of Elvis' singing here is extraordinary.

There are plenty of revelations here for those who know only the biggest singles. "How Great Thou Art" and "Crying in the Chapel", two cuts from Elvis' 1967 gospel album, How Great Thou Art, feature over-the-top arrangements, but Elvis brings a palpable vocal intensity to the material-- these were songs he is said to have felt very deeply, and that's the way they come across. "Pocketful of Rainbows", a tune from G.I. Blues, with its thick reverb and spacious arrangement, sounds oddly contemporary, a haunting but straightforward bit of mid-century pop. To use a recent touchstone, you can just about trace Richard Hawley's entire oeuvre to it. Like the gospel cuts and 1963's "I Need Someone to Lean On", an ultra lean ballad with a cocktail jazz tone, it shows a side to Elvis' singing that hasn't been overexposed, and it still sounds terrifically fresh.

Just as Elvis' voice pushed decent material into the realm of greatness, so it managed to wring something out of a duff song. "Bossa Nova Baby" is one of Leiber and Stoller's lyrically fuzzier and more dated creations, and it has the added handicap of not being not especially fun, but Elvis almost makes it worth hearing again. "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" from 1975 is a bland, unconvincing attempt to recapture the early rock'n'roll energy, and there are a couple of early "That's All Right" re-writes here that don't impress. But with the energy Elvis brought to his singing in the 50s, it didn't much matter. Even where the songs fail to connect as songs-- and for me there quite a few here-- Elvis' presence often redeems them.

For music fans who have trouble following along with Elvis' Vegas shtick as his career wore on, it's a cliché to say that the Sun Sessions, those recordings Elvis made in Memphis before he was nationally famous, are the best thing he ever did. And while I won't make that argument, considering how much he developed and expanded what he could do as he went on, the six tracks here from those sessions have lost nothing and still resonate, and I'm probably more likely to play "Blue Moon of Kentucky" than just about anything here. Elvis sounds like a teenager (which he was) who is just starting to realize the thrilling power of his gifts.

But oddly, the next track I'm likely to play is "Unchained Melody", the second to last cut on the set, recorded in 1977 during one of his final shows. As you can see from a stirring YouTube, Elvis during this period is bloated, caked in horrifying makeup, and drugged, a shell of a man only months away from death. But somehow, sitting down at the piano, he manages to wring something out of this song that no one else had imagined. It's garish, operatic, and morbid, and I feel a little guilty for how much I love it; Elvis failed in so many ways, but this was his one untouchable thing, and I love hearing him do it in spite of it all, speaking to the world in the one language he thoroughly mastered. That the song to follow it and close out Good Rockin' Tonight is the bland and forgettable big beat remix of "A Little Less Conversation", commissioned for Nike's 2002 World Cup campaign, is a reminder of how easily that communication can become garbled.